Disclaimer: Oh, please. They aren't mine. They belong to
Alliance/Atlantis and the Pauls.

Many, many thanks and much love to a quartet of wonderful beta readers:
AuKestrel (for encouragement and insights above and beyond the call of
duty), Kit Mason and Sihaya Black (for always asking the right questions
and always having the right answers), and, as always, C.L. Finn - with
whom I evidently share a single overworked Muse (...okay, C, you can have
the Muse back now).

Internal Affairs
by Beth H.
(c) April 2001

* * * * *

Twenty-three months after ending the quest for the Hand of Franklin,
and in all that time we hadn't spent a night apart.

The quest - that was one weird trip. Didn't have a clue what I was
doing there, and I mean that metaphorically as much as literally. Still
can't believe I was the one to suggest we go mushing off into the middle
of nowhere looking for something that probably didn't even exist, but I
guess I must've because off we went.

Fraser wouldn't have done it. Oh, he agreed, and enthusiastically, but
he was pretty damned surprised, too. Reminded me one of the first things I
ever said to him was that I got a skin condition whenever I was out of the
city, so I get why my suggestion that we go off on an adventure into the
wilderness would sound strange to him. Sounded strange to me, and I was
the one saying it.

Did I really want to be up there, God knows how long, freezing my ass
off in the Northwest Territories? Nah. Not then. Not really. I mean, what
did I know about doing the Arctic Boy Scout thing? Nothing, that's what.
Took weeks before I was even halfway close to pulling my own weight, and I
know it sounds nuts, but I'm still a little suspicious that Dief had
figured out some way to convince the dogs on the team to go easy on me
while I was learning to mush.

All I knew was that I wasn't quite ready to pick up whatever was left
of my real life back in Chicago and I sure as hell wasn't ready to say
goodbye to Fraser. Or maybe I just thought I needed a little time to
chill.

Couldn't have picked a better place for 'chilling' than the
Territories.

It was cold. I mean, big surprise, right? We're talking about the place
that put the "perma" in "permafrost." But I still didn't expect it would
be as cold as it was - so cold that Fraser had us zip the sleeping bags
together every night to conserve body heat. Considering the two of us
ended up . . . well . . . anyway, you'd think that sleeping together like
that all the time might have started something, but nothing happened
during the entire four months we were away, and I mean nothing. Not a
kiss. Not a hug. Hell, we barely bumped elbows during the night.

But then we woke up one morning and it kind of hit us both at the same
time that there hadn't been snow on the ground for, like, weeks, and the
dogs were just kind of hanging out, not doing much of anything, and we
decided it was probably time to pack in the quest. Hey, we still had jobs
to get back to, and you know, I don't think either of us ever really
thought we were going to find the Hand of Franklin in the first place. It
was never about that. So we set off to what passes for civilization up in
the Territories, and it was like . . . I don't know . . . like we were
both hit upside the head with a baseball bat at the same time.

That first night back in town we got the dogs squared away, leaving
Dief, who was in the early stages of a little wolf-kinda flirtation, to
stay with the others. Then we got some dinner for ourselves (you don't
know how great food tastes when it isn't flash-freezing on its way from
the pot to your mouth), and took a couple of rooms at a local bed and
breakfast sort of place run by Carl McPherson, an old friend of Buck
Frobisher's.

Sometimes I could swear there aren't more than thirty-two people living
up there in the Great White North, and they all know each other.

McPherson's was pretty nice, not that I really had any accommodation
standards left after all that time on the trail. Hey, look, four walls, a
bed, central heat? I was good, better than good. The rooms were small, of
course. From the outside it looked like you couldn't have squeezed four
cots into the place, much less four bedrooms, but, no . . . it had real
bedrooms. Real beds, too, which was one of the few things I'd been missing
like crazy from day one of our adventure. And I'll tell you, I don't care
what Fraser says, I could tell that even Nature Boy was looking forward to
getting his almost forty-year-old backside up off the cold hard ground for
a night or two.

So Fraser and me, we were both pretty wiped out, even though it was
only eight o'clock, and we decided to turn in for the night We both
stopped for a second in the middle of the narrow hallway that separated
our two rooms.

"Good night, Ray. Sleep well."

"Yeah, you too, Fraser. See you in the morning."

I turned away and started to walk toward my room when all of a sudden
something just felt . . . weird.

Weird. Wrong. Something was wrong. Something felt wrong, but what the
hell could it be? No one else was staying in Carl's place that night
except for Fraser and me . . . and even Carl had left for the day. I
hadn't even seen anyone around for an hour, but I was still feeling
creepy.

Tried to shake off the feeling, but I couldn't. I turned around,
figuring I'd knock on Fraser's door and ask if he'd noticed anything out
of place before he'd gone into his room . . .

. . . and he was still standing on the threadbare carpet in the hall,
exactly where I'd left him.

He wasn't moving, but he'd got his eyes fixed on me with such a strange
combination of intensity and loneliness that all of a sudden I knew what
was wrong.

I thought I knew.

Yeah, I did know.

We were going to sleep. Apart.
I stood there down at "my" end of the hall, wondering how the thought
of sleeping without Fraser next to me had ended up feeling that wrong. But
it did, and he was still looking at me like he was feeling the same thing
and I was just looking back at him and thinking I should be freaking out
right about then - or at least that I should be freaking out more than I
was. But I just couldn't.

Go figure. Ray Kowalski, the king of the short-term freak out, wanting
to freak out about something and not being able to. What kind of weird
alignment of planets had just kicked in here in my personal solar system?

I started to smile at that thought, and it was pretty obvious that
Fraser thought my smile was for him 'cause he started to smile back . . .
and the smile on his face was big and open and so fucking cool that the
next thing I knew I was smiling at him.

And the two of us just stood there in the hall, grinning at each other
like a couple of idiots. And even though neither of us had said a damned
word yet, I swear I'd never felt more right about anything in my whole
life . . . until a minute later when Fraser held out his hand to me.

I didn't move.

We both stopped smiling.

Fraser went white, and he looked almost as scared as I felt, but he
kept his hand out, palm open, and I walked toward that reaching-out hand
of his and took it in mine and . . .

. . . damn.

Fraser and me, we were partners and friends; we'd touched each other a
hundred times before, but never anything like that. That was scary. More
than scary There was that weirdness again . . . a together weirdness that
felt just about the same as the apart weirdness. But this . . . oh yeah,
this was a good weirdness.

A great one.

I almost felt like crying for a second there, it all felt so fucking
great, but the next minute hit and instead of crying, I could feel that
same dopey smile plastered all over my face that I could see on Fraser's.

"So, we gonna spend the night standing out here in the hall, Frase?" I
asked, trying for cool and casual, but hearing a stupid croak in my voice
I hadn't heard since I was thirteen.

I looked down, a little embarrassed, but Fraser's grip tightened on my
hand, strong and warm. I looked up, and he was still smiling at me like I
was . . . like I was a snow field on legs or something.

And then he just leaned in and kissed me. Hard. On the mouth. And how
great was that?

I held back a minute, though. "Fraser?"

"Yes, Ray?"

" That thing you were doing with your mouth . . . ."

"Oh, that. That's a kiss. You seemed to be having some difficulty with
. . . ."

"A kiss?"

"Standard procedure." The corner of his mouth quirked up a little, but
he bit down and went back to that bland look that could mean anything.

He cocked his head to one side and looked at me like I was a few aces
short of a full deck, then started to laugh.

"I should imagine this will change almost everything, Raymond
Kowalski," he said, still laughing. But not laughing at me, I got that.
Just laughing.

Giggling.

I shook my head. Fraser giggling. Damn. And it was cute. And who knew
I'd think it was so cute? I know . . . I was a complete sap, and I didn't
care.

I was so damned happy.

It was my turn to reach out now. Opened both my arms - wide - and
Fraser moved into them, putting his arms around me, natural as anything,
and we just stood there for a minute, holding each other.

And you know? That hug . . . that first hug that didn't have anything
to do with a cover story or comfort or whatever . . . that hug was almost
better than the first kiss. But it was nowhere near as good as the first
night together that followed, even though neither of us had a whole lot of
experience when it came to figuring out what to do with a guy in our beds.

But nothing was as great as waking up next to Fraser the next
morning, both of us realizing that weird as this was, this was it. This
was just fucking it for both of us.

We were together.

And it felt right then like nothing was ever going to keep us apart
again.

* * *

"Calm down, Detective. If you'd just hear us out . . . ." Charm was
practically oozing out of Suit One's mouth, but I wasn't in any mood to
buy what he was selling. The two of them had been testing out their "fake
cop, faker cop" tap routine for twenty minutes, but so far, all it had
done was give me a giant headache.

"Hear you out? I've already heard more than I want to hear, thanks." I
got up from the table where we'd all been pretending to have a civilized
conversation and headed for the door. I'd had a long day, I was tired, and
I'd just about hit my capacity for pretense during the big undercover
Vecchio gig two and a half years earlier. "Thanks, but no thanks . . . I
really don't need to hear any more."

"Detective?" Suit Number One was still talking, and I still didn't want
to listen.

"La la la . . . nope, can't hear you." I reached for the door handle.

"Detective Kowalski, get back here and sit down!"

I froze, then turned around slowly, fixing my best glare on his
weaselly face. "Did I just get an order? You giving orders to me?"

"No, no, of course not," said Suit Number Two - Genovese - as he shot a
sideways glance toward his partner. "Richards wasn't issuing any orders.
We're just asking you to . . . ."

"To be a rat. That's what you're asking. You want me to be a rat."

"No," Genovese said, now looking a little angry himself. "We're asking
you to be a good cop. To help us with our investigation and to make sure
bad things aren't happening in this department and in this city. To be a
good cop, Kowalski. That's all."

I opened my mouth - and closed it again - a few times before I could
think what to say next. Nothing. I couldn't think of nothing to say. In
fact, the only thing running through my mind at all was that shitty as
this whole deal was, I was going to end up saying yes. Because it was the
"right thing to do."

I walked slowly back to the table, looking hard at both men. If either
of them had given me one of those smug looks that Internal Affairs seems
to have a patent on, I would have been out of there. But they both just
sat there, all patient and serious, like they already knew they had me and
were just waiting for me to know it, too.

"That's all, huh?" I asked as I slumped back down into the vacant
chair.

"That's all," Genovese said, with an expression way too close to
fraternal sympathy and understanding for my liking. If IA wants someone on
one of their investigations, they get them, and that includes me. But what
I was not feeling at that moment was brotherly, and there was sure
as hell no way that Genovese or Richards understood anything about what I
was feeling.

"You know I'm not going to invent a bunch of crap about Vecchio that
isn't there just so you can get your Brownie points, right?" I knew I was
sounding a little belligerent . . . okay, a lot belligerent . . . but I
was still pissed off at having been guilted into taking this on.

There was no reaction on Genovese's face except for a little narrowing
of his eyes that I don't think he meant for anyone to see. "Nobody wants
you to invent anything, Detective. There are more than ten years worth of
allegations in here," he said as he pushed the thick manila file across
the table. "This should give you more than enough to look into without
adding any bursts of creativity to the mix."

I pulled the folder toward me without looking at it. "And if nothing
pans out, you'll let this drop?"

"You're not the only officer involved in this investigation, Kowalski,"
said Richards, "but yeah, you know the drill. If we don't come up with any
corroborating evidence, the investigation comes to a halt before any
charges are brought against him."

I nodded, and took a quick glance at the file before asking, "And my
involvement?"

Genovese's turn again . . . these guys were a helluva tag-team. "I'd
like to tell you that no one ever has to know about your involvement in
this case, but I can't do that. Officially, the file is going to be
sealed, but you and I both know that these things have a way of getting
out sometimes." He shifted a little uncomfortably in his chair. "Look,
Detective Kowalski, I know you're not exactly happy about this . . . ."

I snorted, "That's a hell of an understatement."

"However," he continued, "we need you on this case, and we want you to
know we're grateful to you for agreeing to cooperate." He paused and then
got one of those 'okay, let's wrap it up here' looks on his face. "Do you
have any other questions, Detective?"

"Yeah. What exactly is it I'm supposed to be looking for?"

Richards glanced over at Genovese, then said, "What are you supposed to
be looking for?"

Jesus. "Is there an echo in here? Yeah, what am I supposed to be
looking for. Any hints? Animal, vegetable, or mineral? Bigger than a
breadbox?"

"I'm afraid we can't tell you that, Detective," Richards said after he
shot a quick look at Genovese. "That information is being supplied
strictly on a 'need to know' basis."

"And I don't . . . ."

"You don't need to know. Any other questions?"

"You going to answer them?"

"Of course!" said Richards, impatiently.

"Probably," said Genovese.

Waited a couple seconds . . . a couple more . . . .

"Well, possibly," said Richards.

I figured I'd better jump in there before they'd worked their way down
to "no way, Jose."

"Okay," I said, leaning forward. "Why me?"

"Why you what?" Genovese again; geez, you could get whiplash talking to
those guys.

"Why do you need me on this case? I've got an open homicide and
something ugly that looks like it's shaping up into a serial rape thing on
my desk. Don't you got anyone in your department who's looking for
something to do? What? I got some sort of tattoo saying 'Unemployed
Department Sneak' on my forehead?"

"Do you really need to be told why we want you specifically,
Detective?"

No, I didn't really need to be told. You look at it one way, there was
no one who'd been closer to the subject of the investigation than me. Of
course, you look at it from just about every other direction, there wasn't
anyone who could have been further away. No love lost between me and
Vecchio, that was for damned sure, and neither of us had ever been very
interested in hiding our mutual lack of admiration, except when Ben was
around. I'd tried. After I'd finally met Vecchio, I swear I'd tried for
Ben's sake, but . . . well, anyway . . . vendettas aren't my thing, which
was exactly why I didn't want to agree to do this in the first place.

Of course, I guessed that was one of the big reasons why they wanted me
to do it. IA had to know that I'd bend over backwards to be fair . . . to
not let my personal feelings get in the way of my work. "No, I don't
really need to be told."

"Good."

Genovese stood up, extending his hand across the table, and after a
pause, I shook it. Only takes an extra second to be courteous, as
someone's always telling me.

I'd already started heading out the door, when I heard Richards say,
"Kowalski, one more thing."

I turned back. "Yeah, what?"

"I don't suppose we need to impress upon you the confidential nature of
this investigation."

Geez, did they think I just got out of the Academy that morning? "Yeah,
yeah . . . can't talk to anyone about it. I know that, Richards."

"Corporal," I corrected automatically, before the full meaning of what
Richards had just said knocked all thoughts of accurate ranks right out of
the ballpark. "What are you . . . are you telling me he's under
investigation, too? What kind of bullshit is that?"

"Detective . . . "

"Fraser's so fucking clean that if he has to jaywalk while he's going
after a perp, he stops to write himself a ticket . . . ."

"Detective . . . ."

These guys were really starting to piss me off. "And since when do we
have jurisdiction over Mounties? Aren't they protected by the Geneva
Convention or something?"

"Detective!"

"What!"

"Corporal Fraser is not under investigation."

"Oh." What had I been thinking? . . . of course he wasn't. "Good. Okay,
that's good."

"We're fully cognizant of the Mountie's sterling reputation, Detective
Kowalski. In fact, while we were putting together the preliminary
findings, we noted a conspicuous decrease in certain of Detective
Vecchio's . . . um . . . ."

"Exactly." Richards nodded again. "A decrease in certain of Detective
Vecchio's activities and an interruption in his regular patterns of
behavior during the time the two men were working together."

Got to admire a guy who can say so little with so many words. "So why .
. . ."

"However, we're also aware of Corporal Fraser's longstanding friendship
with Detective Vecchio. We know you're aware of the regulations as they
pertain to a case of this sort. We felt, however, that it might not be
entirely inappropriate to err on the side of caution, and while . . . ."

So that was that. I opened the door, walked out in the hallway, and . .
. shit! What was I going to tell Ben, when there was nothing at all that I
could tell him?

* * *

Vecchio. I was the guy for more than a year and I just never got
him. Didn't get what made him tick, didn't get why Ben liked him so much
as a friend, and I sure as hell didn't get what my ex-wife saw in him that
made her pack up and move down to Florida with him to run a bowling alley,
of all things.

Of course, that bowling alley deal didn't last more than a couple of
months. I knew Stella wouldn't be able to hack it: way too blue-collar for
her tastes. And Vecchio? I don't know . . . maybe his Armani suits started
to wilt in the Florida heat. Maybe he was just bored. Whatever it was,
back the two of them came, although when the lovebirds returned to
Chicago, Stella went into private practice and Vecchio fell into some
cushy job attached to Chief Bellows' office, so it wasn't like I had to
spend much time thinking about either of them.

But then IA called and . . . I couldn't think how working that Vecchio
investigation for them wasn't going to screw things up in my life. Really,
I suppose I could've guessed things wouldn't keep going good - going easy
- the way they'd been going with the job and Ben and everything. Maybe I'd
just gotten soft, 'cause it wasn't so long ago that somewhere in the back
of my mind I'd have been expecting something bad to come along and
fuck things up.

Always seems to happen the same way. I get into a groove - some kinda
happy place - and then soon as I lower my guard, something comes out of
nowhere and BOOM, there I am, laid out on the canvas with a half dozen
cartoon birds making a racket over my head.

Every so often something happens to get things back to good, the way it
did with my folks, but that was a damned long decade's worth of a
knock-out punch. And most of the time, once I'm out, I'm out for the
count, like I was with Stella. I swear I never saw the upper cut coming
that knocked me out that time.

How could I when Stella was being so reasonable?

Stella knew I didn't want the marriage to end, and she said she didn't
either, so we spent a lot of time working out how to stay together. The
books she'd been reading said communication was the answer, so that was
that. We talked.

Then Stella read something about how we should both come up with a list
of things that were important to us - things we thought might help the
marriage. My suggestions were like "let's go dancing," or "let's make
love." Not really the kind of thing that family counseling guy who's
always yapping on Oprah recommends - even I knew that - but at least it
was stuff we both liked doing . . . stuff we were good at.

Our own kind of communication.

Stella's suggestions ran more along the lines of things like "We need
to try and respect each other's personal space, Ray," and "Maybe we should
take separate vacations this year, Ray," and finally "You're driving me
crazy, Ray! I can't deal with any more of this, Ray! You're going to have
to move out, Ray!"

And how dumb was I? Even with my bags packed and sitting by the door, I
still couldn't quite figure out that this meant Stella wanted me
gone for good. Even then I still thought . . . I don't know what I
thought, but I'm pretty sure I was still hoping that someday we'd get back
together . . . like maybe me moving out was one of those separate
vacations she kept wanting us to take.

By the time I finally woke up and smelled the espresso, everybody else
I knew had already gotten a clue. Me? I only got in touch with my inner
clue bus when it almost ran me down on the way out of town.

I still got some bruises there. Stella . . . she . . . well, it'd just
been Stella and nothing but Stella for me for so long, you know?

Anyway, while Stella was doing her fade-to-black thing out of my life,
a couple of things did start to click. First, the job and then . . . Ben.

Before Ben, the job was pretty much all that was going anything like
really okay. I wasn't ever going to win the Miss Popularity contest at my
old district, but at least no one thought I sucked, except maybe me every
once in a while. And I was doing good work - good enough to be tapped for
the undercover assignment they had going down at the 2-7.

Vecchio, well, one look at the snapshots they'd clipped to his file,
and it was pretty obvious why he got picked to go undercover. With that
Adolph Menjou moustache, the guy was a dead ringer for Armando
Langoustini. Yeah, growing up in a neighborhood surrounded by wiseguys
couldn't have hurt him playing the role, but I had to figure it was mostly
about the look.

Not me, though. Hell, nobody with half a brain was ever going to
mistake me for Ray Vecchio, no matter what I did. Of course, most of the
brass don't have any more brains than most of the mob guys I've met, which
is probably why it was so easy to keep the truth from almost everybody.

Personally, I figured I'd be made on the first day, and that would be
that for the undercover assignment, but it never happened. I showed up for
work, wearing what turned out to be something Ray Vecchio wouldn't be
caught dead in (although that's pretty much true for almost everything in
my closet), and . . . nothing.

I mean, the whole idea of playing Vecchio was freaking me out a little,
so there I was doing some kind of weird duck and weave, and it was all for
nothing. I was just there, you know? Frannie Vecchio came over to my desk
early in the day and bitched at me about a hamster named Buttons. Jack
Huey asked me what I knew about Schulbin, who I figured might have
something to do with some case Vecchio had been working on but who turned
out to be a neighborhood tailor. And that was about it for my morning.

Afternoon came, same thing. I took a few calls, talked to a woman who
came into the station looking for a place to complain about an appliance
store owner who refused to sell her a pair of carrier pigeons, went out
for a tuna on rye.

By the time I got back, I'd shaken most of the new-kid-at-the-beach
ants off the Kowalski blanket, and settled down to go through Vecchio's
case reports and notes. I started reading and pretty soon I'm thinking the
guy I'm replacing was one hell of a cop. No open cases left on his desk,
no missing pages in his reports - and those reports read like something
you'd give the Pulitzer to, they didn't even have any typos. Even his
pencils were all sharpened. By that point, I was getting a little weirded
out; nobody's that good. The guy had to be superhuman.

But then I went back a couple of years - looked at some older files -
and, bam! It was like night and day. There was stuff there that looked
like it'd been gathering dust for a decade. Forty-one open cases at one
time, for god's sake. And these reports were all pretty cop-basic: "pulled
rap sheet . . . interviewed witnesses . . . the witnesses saw nothing . .
. brought in Colonel Mustard to find out if he was in the Library with a
Candlestick . . . blah, blah, blah." So I'm thinking that either Vecchio
took some continuing ed classes from the Acme Cop School somewhere along
the way, or I'm not the first guy to play him. For all I knew there was a
line of fake Vecchios stretching all the way back to the Truman
Administration.

I was still thinking about all this when Frannie told me that Welsh
finally wanted to see me. Mouth went dry, felt a little nauseous . . . it
was sort of like being a kid again and getting called into the principal's
office. I knew I hadn't done anything wrong . . . hell, I hadn't had time
to screw up. But it's still, you know . . . Welsh, he was the guy who
could kick my ass with . . . um . . . with impunity.

I got into the office and before we sat down, Welsh had me shut the
door behind me, while he went over to shut the blinds.

"Detective, it's a pleasure. You settling in all right?"

"Uh. Yeah." That sounded impressive. Way to wow the new boss with my
extemporaneous speaking abilities.

"So," he said, looking down at the file on his desk, "Stanley Kowalski,
is it?"

"I . . . um . . . I go by Ray."

"Do you? Good, good . . . that's a good thing. Candy?"

"Huh?" Oh yeah, I was sounding smarter by the minute.

Welsh rolled his chair back from the desk, opened a side drawer, and
pulled out a small plastic cup.

I took a few and placed them experimentally on my tongue. "Huh.
Different. Not bad." I bit down on them, kind of grinding them into my
back right molars. "The shell's a little thicker, but the chocolate's got
sort of a subtle taste to it. Yeah, I could get used to these."

"You're a connoisseur of chocolate, Kowalski?"

"Nah, more of a candy hobbyist. Have been for years. Milky Ways,
Snickers, M&M's . . . hated it when they took the red ones off the
market for all those years."

"Ah, yes . . . Red Dye #2."

"Red Dye #3, I think."

Welsh peered at me from across the desk. "Are you correcting me,
Detective?"

A moment of minor panic, then I figured, what the hell . . . the guy
keeps candy hidden away in his desk: how tough could he be? I just grinned
at him. "Wouldn't think of it, Lieu."

Truth was, a couple days later I was still a little suspicious about
how smooth it was all going - the whole Stella thing had me a little more
ready than usual to expect the worst - but even I couldn't bitch about
things going good, not without looking like an idiot. I mean, the
Lieutenant had turned out to be okay, I was making progress with my new
cases, and the folks in the squad were friendly enough, even though I
wasn't going to have a permanent partner until that Mountie got back into
town. Still didn't know what was up with that deal, but I wasn't going to
start rocking the boat yet; I figured I'd have more than enough time for
deciding whether to complain about not having an official partner after
I'd met the Canadian guy.

In the end, though, the last thing I wanted to do after I met my new
partner was complain. Stare, maybe. Through an electron microscope, if I
had to. Anything to figure out what made the guy tick. But not complain.

Picture it. Guy comes back from his Mountie sabbatical to find rubble
where his apartment used to be, everything he owns destroyed, a new place
to work in, and his only real friend in Chicago MIA. And me. He finds me
calling myself Vecchio, sitting at Vecchio's desk, carrying Vecchio's
shield . . . and nobody's telling him anything.

He didn't believe I was Vecchio, of course. Not for a minute. Like I
said, you didn't have to be a genius to know I wasn't Vecchio, especially
not if you'd ever met either one of us, and Benton Fraser was no dummy.

But none of that stopped him from doing his job. I mean, I turn around
to see this ramrod-straight, Smokey-the-Bear guy, and just seeing how out
of place he looked with our scruffy station house for a backdrop should've
made me laugh out loud, but this Fraser character was just looking
confused and unhappy as hell. And even though his life had just sort of
collapsed around him, he spent his first day back plugging away at a case.

My case.

Yeah, like I said, I'd already heard about this unofficial partnership
thing that Vecchio and the Mountie had going, and it wasn't like he wasn't
an interested party. Hell, it was his place that had been burned to
the ground. But I figured Fraser had some kind of work he was
supposed to do over at the Consulate. Processing ice fishing permits.
Walrus wrangling.

But the walruses had to wait, because he had work to do with his
partner.

Against both of our expectations, we clicked. Clicked from day one.
Went through some rough times, sure; almost busted up the partnership a
couple of times. But we stayed together, and the work went great, and
we were great, and eventually, well . . . like I said, eventually
even the thought of being apart was just too weird to, um, contemplate.

So we moved in together.

Yeah, simple as that. You know, Ben and me might've still been in that
early infatuation stage of our relationship, but it didn't make us stupid.
We knew the Chicago PD probably wasn't going to be dancing the cha-cha at
the thought of the two of us living together. Hell, neither was the RCMP,
for that matter.

But Ben, for all his weird politeness and goody-two-shoes behavior,
never seemed to really give a rat's ass about what other people thought of
him. And when I took a good look at myself, I realized I didn't either . .
. at least not when something was important to me.

So some people would think we were freaks - not much new there.
Whatever. Us freaks had to stay together. So we did. And it was good
between us - so good that finally even I couldn't imagine things not being
that good ever again.

Then IA crawled up out of their den asking me to check into Vecchio's
murky history, and what do you know? The cartoon bird chorus started
warming up for another concert.

* * *

The worst part about working that IA thing was the aloneness. Even back
at the start of my time playing Vecchio, there were all these people who
knew what was going on, giving me a nod and a wink every so often to
remind me that they got it. But that wasn't happening with this
assignment. Only IA knew what I was working on, and "to protect the
integrity of the operation" they were keeping as far away from me as they
could.

And who am I kidding? If anyone I worked with had known anything about
the Vecchio investigation, they wouldn't have been nodding and winking,
that's for damned sure.

Only so far I could go chasing paper trails from the file Genovese and
Richards had given me; I finally had to bite the bullet and start nosing
around Vecchio's former colleagues - which mostly meant my current
colleagues - and see what I could find out.

Skimmed through the stack of papers like I'd been doing every day since
I got the assignment - I swear I could have gone on a quiz show with
Vecchio as my specialty subject after a few days - but nothing was popping
out at me. I went back to one of the old tried and true methods I'd picked
up in my first days in uniform, namely, closing my eyes, counting to
three, and pulling out the first piece of paper I touched.

Excessive force accusations over the years . . . huh . . . hadn't
looked at this one very carefully. Not much there, to be honest, although
it was a little freaky that the few names mentioned in the report were
pretty much all people from around Vecchio's old neighborhood. Like I'd
figured, Guy Rankin's name popped up. Okay, good . . . maybe I could look
into that whole deal a little more.

Got a chance to do that a day or two later, when I got called in to
assist on one of Huey and Dewey's cases. Really wasn't nothing in the way
of assisting left to do - I was just one of the guys on the
block-the-doors and mop-up-the-scumbags bust committee. A good wrap up,
though, so Welsh herded everyone over to Maxwell's for a drink or three
and all the free bar food we could get our hands on.

Ben couldn't come along. There were arrangements that had to be sorted
out for some upcoming visit by the Australian trade delegation, and the
two fresh-out-of-the-Depot constables - Sarah Lewis and Cyril Clark - had
been given the task of organizing things by Inspector Sellers. Trouble
was, neither of them could find their rear-ends with both hands tied
behind their backs. Didn't have anything to do with Ben, who had plenty of
his own work to take care of, but Corporal Responsible wasn't about to
risk letting them screw things up, so he'd gone back over to the Consulate
to do a little protocol coaching..

Didn't usually like going out without Ben after work. If this had been
an ordinary night, I'd probably have found myself wandering over to the
Consulate to spend the evening watching him give lessons in napkin ring
stuffing or something. I'd just rather be with him than not be with him.

But it was probably just as well that he wasn't around that night,
watching me try to pump my co-workers for information about one of his
best friends. Despite what a lot of people might think about me, I can be
. . . subtle. I mean, I was pretty subtle that night. But there was no way
Ben wouldn't've noticed something was up with me.

Me sitting around in a bar, swapping friendly stories about Ray Vecchio
by choice? Not likely.

So everyone's getting all relaxed, and I'm sitting next to Huey,
drawing him out about old cases. Coincidence that they all happened to be
ones that involved Ray Vecchio? Of course not. And I'm feeling like a
creep, but pretty soon some of the others are joining in, adding their
comments, and of course most of them are halfway to getting smashed, so
I'm having to take everything they say with a grain of salt, but I'm
getting some interesting stuff anyway..

"Hey," Dewey said, "I heard he once shot an unarmed ATM machine when it
wouldn't give him any money. Is that for real?"

"He do anything to get on their bad sides?" I asked. "Insult their
fashion sense or something?"

"Hard to say," Huey answered. "Could be. All I know is I've never known
a guy to have more bad luck with those things. Did you know his ATM cards
have been eaten three times?"

"Four," Lieutenant Welsh cut in, "although he was dead the fourth time,
so that might have been an honest mistake on the ATM's part."

Huey stared at Welsh. "Dead?" Then he started laughing. "Oh yeah!
During the Great Ricocheting Bullet Era. You ever hear about that,
Kowalski? Vecchio gets shot, then tries to play it out all the way to
permanent disability. He was walking around with a diagram that showed the
bullet hitting every major organ at least once. I think he started
believing his own story by the end."

"What happened?" I asked.

Welsh said, "The insurance company must have figured that no one could
sustain injuries of that type and survive, because the next thing we knew,
Vecchio was officially the late Ray Vecchio, and not an ATM in the
city would recognize him."

"Is it just ATM's that he's got a personality conflict with . . . um .
. . and me?"

Huey smiled, then got a serious look on his face. "You know, he took on
Frank Zuko a couple of times - on the guy's own turf, too. I even heard he
beat the hell out of him in some gym once. The way the story came down to
us, it might have been payback for Zuko's men working over Fraser, but no
one's really sure."

Huh . . . no one had ever mentioned this before. I really wanted to
find out what had happened to Ben, but I just said "Vecchio knows how to
throw a punch?"

"It would appear so," said Welsh. "It's straight out of Ripley's, isn't
it?"

"You know, Ray can be mighty handy with his fists when he's angry.
Remember your stiff in the wall? Guy Rankin? We'd arrested him - this was
before he was dead, stuffed in a plastic bag, and sealed in a wall, of
course . . . "

"Sure. There's no challenge arresting a dead guy."

Huey just gave me one of those "you want to hear this story or not?"
looks and said, "Anyway, we had to let him go."

"Oh, yeah, I heard about that. Forgetting to Mirandize him, Vecchio
beating on the guy . . . what was up with the two of you that day?" I
asked.

"Nothing to do with me," said Huey, shaking his head. "As soon as we
picked up Rankin, Ray had me stay as far away as possible. I have no idea
what Ray's problem was with that man."

Somewhere around this point, I noticed that Frannie was glancing over,
cringing a little every time the name Guy Rankin was raised - I had to
wonder, did she have some sort of history with the guy, too? - but the
subject changed pretty quick, and she went back to her conversation at the
other end of the table.

Eventually, everyone got bored talking about Vecchio and started in on
the Cubs' chances for the season. Non-existent, of course, so I took that
as my cue to haul my tired ass out of there.

Worst part of the night? I'd put my jacket on and was heading for the
door, when Huey passed me on his way back from the can. He wasn't really
drunk, but he was definitely buzzed and was on a different kind of high
from getting the case wrapped . . . and as he saw me leaving, he stopped
to give me a hug.

"Hey, Ray . . . Ray? Ray. We've got to do this more often, man."

"Yeah, Jack. Sure. Hey, you did good work."

He'd started shaking his head as soon as the word 'you' had passed my
lips. "Nah, we did good work. We all did good work, today."

"Sure, Jack . . . teamwork."

"Teamwork. That's it, Ray. Working with a team, people you can trust .
. . friends. What's better than that?" He hugged me once more for good
measure, and wandered off in the direction of the table.

Hated that.

Really hated that.

Huey was my friend - hell, they were all my friends - but I'd been
treating them like the next best thing to strangers in an interrogation
room. Worse than that, really; at least when I bring someone in for
questioning, they know they're being questioned. But this . . . it
just sucked, and there wasn't anything I could do about it . . .
couldn't get out of this, no matter how much I wanted to.

Fraser was great about not pushing at me. He knew I was working on
something that I couldn't talk about, and he respected that - respected my
boundaries. Maybe he respected them a little too much. Didn't know what he
was thinking about any of this, and I hate being outside what someone else
is thinking, even if it's my fault that I've been pushed outside. Too much
like being sent to my room. Ben lived with me, he was the closest person
in my life, and he wasn't trying to get inside my head. And I wanted him
to, didn't want to be alone in my room. So of course I started getting
pissy with him over everything and nothing.

No matter how snotty I acted, though, Ben kept his cool. And at least
once a day, I'd hear some variant of "Are you sure you're all right, Ray?"
But of course I wasn't. I was getting more not all right all the
time . . . and I couldn't say anything, especially not to him.

"Nah, sorry . . . it's just this case, you know?" I'd usually say, and
Ben would nod and carry on with whatever he'd been doing. I did notice
that he'd usually edge a little closer to me for the next few minutes or
so . . . maybe rub his hand across the back of my neck, that sort of
thing.

That always felt good. Every reminder that he cared how I was feeling -
cared what happened to me - felt good. Better than good. But it wasn't
enough.

What I think I was probably hoping for was for Ben to make me talk
about what I was working on, even though it would be going against every
IA policy in the book, but of course that was something that Ben, being
Ben, would never do.

I knew that.

Most of me was even cool with it.

But it bugged the hell out of the part of me that really wanted to
talk, and so I kept trying to push him to . . . what? . . . force a
confession out of me or something?
Pretty fucked up of me, really, since it wasn't fair to him. But even
knowing that didn't stop anything. I just kept on - niggling and niggling
away at him. Over everything. No matter how dumb.

Even when I knew I was wrong, like the Night of the Anchovies.

You'd think a guy like me who'd practically lived on pizza for years
would know all the toppings like they were his best friends or something,
but I didn't. Big deal.

But I was making some pasta for dinner one night, and Ben raised the
subject of anchovies. Hypothetical anchovies, because there was no way I
was adding anchovies to my sauce. I'd tasted them once, hated them, and
told Ben they were the only vegetable I couldn't stand.

"Anchovies are fish, Ray."

"Listen, you think I don't know fish from vegetables? Anchovies are
definitely vegetables."

Ben walked into the living room looking like a man with a mission and
headed straight for his Concise Oxford English Dictionary. Why did I even
bother to say that it was Fraser's OED. Like I'm going to own a
dictionary that comes with its own magnifying glass?

Two minutes later, Ben came back into the kitchen - OED in hand - and
started to read the definition to me out of the book. Without the
magnifying glass.

I turned around to stare him down a little and maybe shut him up, but
he was on a roll. Totally ignored my glare, of course.

"Can't you ever be wrong?" I finally asked. "Do you always have to know
the answer to everything?"

"I'm often wrong about things, Ray. You know that. It's just that I
believe it's better to know things than not know them, particularly
if the answer is easily found."

"I mean, you never just let anything rest," I said, giving the sauce an
angry stir. "You always have to find the answers. Always have to know the
truth. You ever think that sometimes it's better not to know?"

"This isn't about anchovies!" I yelled. God, why couldn't I just shut
up?

"I thought that's what we were tal . . . "

"Yeah, we were talking about anchovies, but this isn't about anchovies.
This is about how it's sometimes better to just not know anything."

"That's just foolish, Ray."

"Yeah? Tell that to whatshisname, Oedipus."

"I hardly think that's a fair analogy."

"You wouldn't, would you, hubris-meister?"

"Ray, you can't compare looking up a word in the dictionary in order to
confirm its meaning with overweening pride."

"You want to know something, Fraser? I can do pretty much whatever I
want to."

"Ray . . . "

"Enough! Christ." I took the wooden spoon I'd been using for the sauce
and threw it across the room, splattering tomato sauce against the wall.
"Just let it go, for fuck's sake! Do you think you can do that?"

"You know, I believe I can let it go. In fact, at this moment,
nothing would please me more." Ben wheeled around and walked off toward
the bedroom.

I smacked the counter a couple times, hoping I'd get some of this shit
out of my system, but an angry hiss from the front right burner drew my
attention back to the sauce . . . too freaking late. The damned sauce had
boiled over and was in the process of fusing itself permanently to the
stove top.

Twice as pissed, I turned off the burners and yelled after Ben, "What
about the fucking dinner?"

He called over his shoulder, "I'd be happy to tell you exactly what you
could do with the 'fucking dinner' but I don't want to be accused - once
again - of rubbing your nose in yet another thing you don't know."

Deserve it? Didn't deserve it? It barely mattered at this point.

"Yeah? Well . . . fuck you!" I yelled toward the bedroom.

"Not likely!" Fraser yelled back, slamming the bedroom door against any
other comments I might have had in my arsenal.

I kicked the stove . . . and you know what? Even before my foot made
contact I guessed that kicking the stove was, probably, a stupid idea. My
guess was confirmed a second later when the pot of burnt pasta sauce
crashed to the floor, spraying tomato sauce over half the kitchen and most
of me.

"Dammit!" I just stood there for a minute, staring at the wreckage
which had almost been dinner.

Waited a minute to see if Mr. Clean was going to make an appearance and
help me out in the kitchen, but he didn't show. He just stayed in the
bedroom, from where I heard nothing but the shouldn't-be-but-was scary
sound of too many drawers opening and closing.

Dief, of course, was no help at all. He came into the kitchen to nose
around for a while, but after finally establishing that there was no meat
on offer, he trotted off to his favorite place to hang out during a
dispute - by the doorway and as far as possible from the two crazy men he
lived with - and promptly fell asleep.

Fine. So I was on cleaning detail on my own. I spent the next forty
minutes cleaning tomato sauce off what seemed like every exposed surface
in the kitchen and stomping around the place like an angry two-year old,
making a racket wherever I went and worrying about whether the sounds in
the bedroom were the sounds of Ben packing. By the time I got to the
banging pots and pans together stage, I was pretty sure that any second
I'd find Ben standing in the doorway, dressed, calling me a spoiled brat,
and leaving to spend the rest of the night at the Consulate.

Really didn't want that to happen. I did not want that to
happen.

However, I didn't know just how scared I was that I might have to spend
the night alone until I got into the bedroom and saw Ben lying there
asleep in the bed.

Christ. I just stared at him like a dummy for what seemed like hours
before I finally took a shuddering breath and started peeling off my
clothes. Even after all the time we'd been together, I still had no idea
why he was so willing to put up with my shit, but I was damned grateful.
By this point, I was so beat I wanted to just drop my t-shirt and jeans
right there on the floor where I stood, but I knew it would just add to
the list of "Things I've Done To Piss Off Ben Recently." Figured if I
couldn't keep from being a jackass while Ben was awake, the least I could
do was throw the clothes into the hamper so there wouldn't be more of a
mess piling up while he slept.

I slipped into bed and curled up a little, facing the open window. All
I wanted right then was to just curl up into the warmth of his body.
Reconnect, you know? But that seemed wrong somehow. Just too damn selfish
to use him like he was some kind of hot water bottle. I didn't even want
to risk waking Ben by pulling the blankets all the way over me, so I just
lay there, as far away from him as I could be without falling off the edge
of the bed, shivering slightly from the cold draft and trying to force
myself to relax enough to fall asleep.

I'd been lying there for a while, feeling sorry for myself, when I felt
Ben's hand on my hip.
"I'm not asleep, Ray."

What was that slogan that was big on bumper stickers in the seventies?
"Don't Sweat the Small Stuff?" Personally, I never got what that meant.
It's almost always the small stuff that ends up counting the most in our
lives: good and bad.

You know, caps left off toothpaste tubes.

Anchovies.

Hands touching hips.

But . . . have you ever wanted something so much, so bad . . . that
when it was finally offered it came close to scaring you to death? That's
how I was feeling about Ben's touch.

Wanted it, oh yeah. God, did I want it. But it didn't stop me from
trying to pull away from the touch of his hand on me.

Ben wouldn't let me.

He pushed firmly on my right shoulder, never letting up on the
pressure, until I was pinned flat on my back, and then he crawled up on
his knees and lowered himself until he was practically enveloping me. I
burrowed automatically into the warmth of his body, even though a part of
me still sort of wanted to break and run.

When Ben's hands reached around me, I tried again to pull away, but he
was holding fast. It looked like the only way I was going to get out from
under him was to beg my way out and that was something I wasn't about to
do.

There it was: a truly fucked-up standoff. Ben, tired and still a little
angry from before - oh yeah, I could see that on his face - and with just
about no clue as to what was going on with me. And me, well . . . me
knowing exactly what I wanted from him and fighting my hardest to keep it
from showing, except I didn't have a clue why I was doing that.

Why was this so hard tonight? Why was I making this so hard? Even
during our stupid blow-up earlier all I wanted was for it to be over, for
us to get back to good, but I just kept pushing Ben away then and kept on
pushing him away now when I wanted him more than I wanted breath in my
lungs.

Ben began to settle his weight on top of my body, but I drew my hands
up onto my chest, curling them into fists - a barrier blocking the beat of
his heart from touching my own. He didn't pull back, though . . . just
placed his hands on either side of my face, forcing me to look up at him.
I closed my eyes, but Ben's fingertips moved, gentle on the corners of my
eyes . . . on my cheekbones . . . on my eyebrows . . . and coaxed my eyes
back open.

"Damn it, Ben," I said in a way-too-quiet, choked sort of voice. "What
do you think you're doing?"

"Is this a 'no,' Ray? Tell me if it is . . . tell me now, and I'll
stop."

I couldn't say no. I could never say no to Ben. Not then. Not now.

The warmth of his body was joined by a new warmth. Breath laid hot
against my temples, my cheeks, my jaw line as Ben traced the curves and
angles of my face. He pushed back up, raising himself inches above me,
mouth hovering above mine, just out of reach, teasing out a response,
drawing me upward to join my mouth to his.

When our mouths finally made contact, it was only the briefest touch -
my tongue licking at Ben's bottom lip. He moved his head closer and nipped
at my tongue, then my lips, with his teeth. The knuckles of my
still-fisted hands pushed hard against the smooth expanse of Ben's chest
as I dragged my fists out from between our bodies, and reached behind him,
stroking the curve of his spine once, then again, before pulling him down
hard in a tight embrace until his trapped arms were no longer at the right
angle to support his weight easily. Ben let himself drop and blanketed me,
heavy against my chest. Hard to take a breath, but Christ, who needed to
fucking breathe?

I shifted beneath him, opening my legs slightly and Ben slipped lower
until his cock pressed hard against my own. He pulled his arms free from
my embrace, inching them slowly up my legs, calloused fingertips brushing
against the hairs of my thighs. He paused, and I felt his warm palms rub
gently over the too-sharp edges of my hips.

He reached beneath me, his hands slipping underneath my ass, holding me
tightly, closing whatever distance still remained between us, then bent
his knees and wrapped himself around me, seeking entry. No, he wouldn't
force his way into my head, but he could still get inside me with his
body. And as he pushed his way into me, hard - inside - for a second I
didn't know whether I was loving it or whether I wanted to hit him, but
then . . . god, that warmth . . . his warmth . . . hot, wet kisses on my
neck, my chest, his warm arms surrounding me . . . his heat inside me . .
. so . . . fucking warm . . . so hot . . .

. . . so loving it won out.

When it was over, I was still shivery, but it wasn't from the cold. I
wrapped myself around Ben and held on as tight as he'd been holding me.

Reconnection.

No way did things really go back to normal right after that night, but
at least there was a break in the tension at home . . . and a break in my
pissiness. Thank God.

Even alone as I'd been feeling, somewhere inside I always knew Ben was
there for me. No, he didn't spend a lot of time talking about the way he
felt, but he showed it to me in just about everything he did. Showed me
that he cared for me, that he . . . loved me.

I knew that. The same way I knew that no matter how much time he
spent with me - no matter how much my own weirdness rubbed off on Ben -
his own brand of closed-off, uptight Mountie weirdness was never going to
disappear completely.

Near as I could figure, the guy had spent most of his adult life living
pretty much entirely in his head and keeping his heart under wraps, at
least as far as the world outside was going to see. Even kept it pretty
well hidden from me half the time, if I wasn't looking carefully enough.

Did that mean Ben didn't have a heart? Hell no. Too much heart, I think
sometimes. When I first met him, I thought he was pretty impervious. Not
just to injuries, but to hurt feelings and all the rest of that stuff. And
I was in good company there, thinking that. Even most of his own people -
other Mounties - thought there was something a little unreal about him.
Then I got to know him, started unwrapping some of those layers, and
damned if it didn't turn out that he was probably easier to hurt
inside than just about any other guy I knew . . . he was just good - too
damned good - at hiding it.

So, okay . . . I'd forgotten for a while how good he was at hiding his
feelings and that it was up to me to watch his heart for him the way he'd
been trying to watch out for mine. Thing was, I'd been so busy feeling
sorry for myself recently - feeling alone - that I'd kind of lost track of
the fact that way too much of the time Ben felt alone, too. And that he'd
felt alone a hell of a lot longer than I had. And that he was going to try
his hardest not to let it show.

What did I think, anyway? That we'd get together and just like that
he'd shed thirty-some odd years of learning to keep everything in, and
just start telling me when he needed something? When he needed
me?

Not a chance.

* * *

Since Welsh knew I had something going on, he was cutting me some slack
and my caseload was pretty light, but there wasn't much chance I was going
to escape all the regular crap that came into the division.

A couple weeks into the investigation, he called me into his office.
Bellowed. Whatever.

"Kowalski!"

As soon as I got in there, he started in on me. "Do you think you might
be able to find some time in your busy schedule to do some police work
that I do know something about? Or would the wheels of justice
cease to turn?"

Couldn't help letting a smile escape - it felt pretty good to have
something kinda normal in my life, even if it was just sarcasm from
Welsh..

"Good, good . . . because I wouldn't want to think that I had made a
bad career decision last year when I turned down Dewey's gracious offer to
let me perform at the One Liner."

Welsh took a second to glance out into the squad room, then reached
into his desk and pulled out his candy dish.

"Have some. And then have a look at this."

I took some M&M's happily enough and then grabbed hold of the
folder he was pushing toward me, although a little less enthusiastically
than I'd taken the candy.

"What's this, Lieu?"

"Garden variety jewelry store burglary, as far as we've been able to
determine."

I started to skim through the initial report. "And why are we handling
this?"

Welsh sighed and scooped some M&M's out of the dish. "Officially?
Because it falls within this division's purview . . . barely.
Unofficially? Because, as it happens, the Commissioner's daughter had just
taken a ring in for re-sizing - a family heirloom, in fact - and it turns
out that ring is one of the missing items."

"What's the owner been able to tell us?

"Hamilton? He sent over . . . Kowalski, why am I telling you any of
this? You have all the information in your hand. Now take that file and
yourself out of my office, and go do some police work."

Went back to my desk and settled down with the case file. I made a
quick call to Bonnie Chu, who'd taken the call when Hamilton first
reported the missing merchandise, but she didn't have much to add to what
was in the report, apart from mentioning that a great coffee bar had just
opened up next door to the jewelers. Maybe it'd be worth paying Hamilton a
visit real soon.

I made a few more phone calls and looked through the list of missing
goods, trying to see if there might be a link between the stuff that was
taken, but what I really wanted was to be working the case with Ben. It
wasn't like I'd somehow forgotten how to do my job without him being
around all the time. But the job was just better when we were together . .
. easier . . . everything just clicked. And it wasn't just about having
another person around to bounce ideas off; I could work with almost anyone
on a case, but Ben . . . Ben was the only one who would ever really be my
partner.

Trouble was, his consular duties got in the way of him being able to .
. . liaise as much as he used to in the early days. The way I heard it,
when Ben first came to Chicago on the trail of the killers of . . . oh
god, he's finally got me doing it . . . anyway, when he first showed up in
Chicago, the guy who used to be in charge at the Consulate - Moffat or
whatever - didn't have a clue what to do with his new constable, except
for stand him outside the place on guard duty and send him out to fetch
dry cleaning. Then Thatcher showed up and she did have a couple
ideas about what to do with Fraser, but when none of them worked out quite
the way she wanted them to, she settled for guard duty and dry cleaning,
too. Bad for Ben, but good for the Chicago Police Department . . . and
especially good for Vecchio.

Then I became Vecchio and . . . yeah, it was good for me, too. But once
Ben had sacrificed his best shot at going back to the Territories where he
belonged, doing the kind of real Mountie work he was born to do ( . . .
and yeah, I know he'd say that it was no sacrifice to stay in Chicago with
me, but I'm never going to be entirely convinced about that), I started
really wishing, for his sake, that his job here in Chicago could be a
little more meaningful.

Be careful what you wish for and all that. The new guy at the
consulate, Sellers, wasn't clueless like Moffat must've been or one of
those permanently exasperated, non-delegating, do-it-yourself types like
Thatcher'd been while she was here. In fact, he turned out to be an okay
guy, and it looked like he was doing his best to help Ben make up for the
fact that he hadn't exactly ended up in the best place he could've been,
career-wise. Sent him off to represent the RCMP at all sorts of
conferences, put him in charge of training the junior Mounties when they
showed up ( . . . the Chicago Consulate had become "the" place to send
wet-behind-the-ears constables for some weird reason - don't ask me why),
gave him the keys to the castle whenever he had to go out of town, that
sort of thing.

And Sellers seemed to understand what the liaison gig was all about,
too. Didn't put any obstacles in Ben's path in terms of working with me,
but since Ben had some real responsibilities by this point, he just wasn't
free to come over and liaise as much as either of us would've liked,
especially when I wasn't working on something big and messy . . . and the
Hamilton Jewelry burglary was anything but big and messy, no matter how
much the Commissioner wanted to think it was.

To be honest, it would've been a relief to just be working that
burglary . . . just doing a little regular cop work for a change, but I
was still spending way too much of my off-work hours with the Vecchio
thing. Talking to more of his old contacts, piecing together expense
account reports, whatever. There still wasn't anything jumping out at me,
but I checked in with Genovese anyway and gave him a heads up on where the
investigation was going. Shot the shit with him for a while (still
couldn't stand Richards, but Genovese had turned out to be pretty cool),
and after I'd finished filling him in on the next-to-nothingness I was
coming up with, he told me he had a visit he wanted me to pay to someone.

Genovese said that one of his fed buddies had set up a private
get-together for me and Sal Castiglione, a former capo in the Zuko family
who'd been sent to Joliet a little over a year ago. Seemed like
Castiglione wasn't too crazy about the idea of staying locked up in prison
for the next fifteen years, and his loyalty to the organization had pretty
much ended when they'd left him hanging in the breeze at his trial,
something that never would've happened in the old days. He was ready to
turn state's evidence in exchange for entering the Witness Protection
Program, and the feds were just about ready to move him out of Illinois,
so I had to get down there fast.

Even though Castiglione spent most of our time together insulting
Vecchio, it was kind of reassuring at the same time. Yeah, he said Vecchio
had been a snot-nosed punk when he was growing up in the neighborhood (and
don't think I wasn't loving it to hear all this crap talked about him,
even if it was just coming out of the mouth of a dumb hood), but the more
he bad-mouthed Vecchio, the less likely it was that Vecchio had anything
to do with any Zuko business, and that had to be a good thing.

"And then there was his father." Castiglione turned his head and spit
on the floor before continuing. "I don't like to speak ill of the dead,
you understand, but that man . . . no pride, you know? No backbone. Never
did nothing for his family; they'd've been living in the streets if it
weren't for Lucia."

"The house wasn't his?"

"His?" Castiglione laughed. "No, nothing was his. Lucia's Uncle Carlo -
may he rest in peace - signed it over to her when he heard she was
marrying that good-for-nothing bum."

"So you knew Ma . . . er . . . Mrs. Vecchio before she got married?"

"Oh sure . . . we all did. A little firecracker, that one. Hey, you
mind if I smoke?"

"Be my guest."

I called the guard in to light Castiglione's cigarette and we both
waited until the door had closed again. Castiglione took a drag off his
cigarette, then said, "Lucia wouldn't give none of us the time of day, of
course. She was looking for a guy with . . . 'prospects.'"

"But she married . . . ."

"Yeah. Heh. Women, go figure." He leaned back in his chair. "You know,
that woman's a saint. Everything those kids of hers ever had - not that it
was ever very much, let me tell you - they got because of their ma. They
got nothing from that father of theirs, except maybe they got smacked
around some. One thing I'll say for that little pissant son of his,
though: when he was a kid he never said a word against his old man. You
gotta give him that, at least. Didn't matter that he had to wear his
cousin Amanda's hand-me-downs half the time, no . . . he stayed loyal to
his pop.

This was really beginning to drive me crazy: every direction I turned
with this Vecchio thing, I either ended up forced into feeling grateful to
the guy for having saved Ben's butt once-upon-a-time . . . or else, like
now, I just ended up feeling sorry for him 'cause of how things were for
him when he was a kid. Amanda's hand-me-downs? Geez. My childhood
was looking better and better all the time.

Finally I just asked Castiglione flat out if Vecchio had any ties with
any of the families, and Castiglione just sat there wheezing and laughing
his ass off, so I'm thinking, "good, at least Vecchio's off the hook at
this end."

Then Castiglione stopped laughing and said, "These days, though? I
don't know . . . there's been some talk. About . . . Vegas, you know? The
Bookman business. Let's just say that nobody's that good an actor all the
time."

I was a little startled, and it must've shown in my face.

"What? You don't think we hear stuff here in the joint? Yeah, we hear
stuff. In fact, maybe more here than anywhere else. I mean, what the fuck
else is there to do in here except play pinochle and sit around gossiping
like a buncha old ladies."

"So," I asked warily, "this discussion going to be part of your next
bridge party conversation?"

"Hell, by this time tomorrow I could be Sven Svenson and living in
Duluth or something. Who am I gonna talk to there? The guy who sells
tickets for the excursion boats on Lake Superior?

I left Castiglione, went out the front gate, and got in my car, just as
confused as I'd been before I went in to talk to him. Still wasn't sure
what to think about the whole deal. No matter what cute little innuendos
I'd had dangled in front of me - and no matter how much of a jerk I
thought Vecchio was - I couldn't get myself to believe the guy was mobbed
up. Not for a minute. There are plenty of assholes running around out
there in the world who aren't mob guys: no reason he couldn't be one of
them. So what then? Just a run-of-the-mill corrupt cop? Couldn't really
buy that either. I kept going back to the Fraser-Factor. My personal
issues with Vecchio aside, everything I'd ever heard about the guy from
Ben, the Justice Barometer, said there was no way Vecchio was dirty. Even
stripping all the "believe-the-best-of-everyone" lunacy from what Ben had
told me over the years, it was hard to see much more in Vecchio than the
kind of lazy, corner-cutting cop that doesn't usually raise a blip on IA's
radar. So what was it that had drawn their interest? Nothing was panning
out so far, and yet Genovese, at least, didn't seem like the kind of guy
who'd be wasting so many people's time and energy on nothing.

Soon as I got back to the station, I dug out the IA file from where I'd
stashed it away and went back over it, trying to see if there was
something I'd missed the last two dozen times I read it. By the time I got
a quarter of the way in, my eyes were glazing over with boredom. Same old,
same old. Some long-forgotten stuff from Vecchio's earliest days on the
force: minor procedural cock-ups, the usual weapons discharge
investigations and clearances ( . . . and yeah, Ben getting "accidentally"
shot by Vecchio during the Victoria Metcalf saga; I'll tell you, if I
didn't have any other reason to want to pop Vecchio one every time I saw
him, that would be a good enough reason all on its own). The allegation
about the missing nine kilos of heroin, dropped because . . .

. . . because of me. Because I spent a single day three years ago
focusing my attention on Marcus Ellery - a ghost from my past - instead of
on my job. Because when I finally made it in to the station that day, I
maneuvered my way into a lineup and when I couldn't be identified as
Vecchio by the informant (big surprise), it brought the whole missing
drugs investigation screeching to a halt.

Damn. What was that snitch's name?

Siracusa.

Put the word out with one of my own guys that I was looking to talk
with Siracusa. He made contact, and I made arrangements for the two of us
to get together for a little chat on Thursday afternoon. Siracusa seemed
pretty cool about that, but when I got there for the meet, the guy was
nowhere to be seen. Stuck around for a while, hoping he'd show, but
waiting in an alley for some lowlife to make an appearance stopped being
on my list of favorite activities right around the time of the Volpe
shooting, so I got back in my car and headed back to the station to pick
up the Hamilton file.

I got home around six that night, pretty much wiped out and hoping to
have something resembling a nice evening at home with Ben, but all that
was there to greet me was an empty apartment. When Ben and Dief finally
arrived, an hour or so past their regular coming-home time, I didn't even
get a greeting from Ben, apart from a half-hearted wave. He just went
straight into the bedroom to change out of his uniform.

I looked over toward the bedroom, but was distracted right away by
Dief's tongue slobbering all over my right ear. I'd been trying since we
first met to get the wolf to understand how gross that was, but he never
paid attention. Ben says he's willful, but I don't know . . . maybe it was
like love at first sight or something - what can you do about that? Maybe
I didn't really mind.

Turned to face Dief and wrestled with him for a minute - it's one of
our things - until he settled on the couch with his head on my leg.

"Hey, guy . . . what's up with our Mountie?" I asked, but Dief wasn't
in the mood to answer. Okay, he couldn't really answer. I mean, I know
that. But sometimes . . . okay, like then: he looked up at me and just
shook his head.

Well, it looked like he shook his head anyway.

Maybe he'd have said more, but Ben came out of the bedroom right then.
He shot a look in Diefenbaker's direction, and Dief instantly dropped his
head back on my leg and closed his eyes like he was sleeping. Sneaky wolf.

Ben watched Dief for a minute, waiting to see if Dief was going to open
his eyes, but the wolf was doing as good a job of not saying anything as
his human was, and eventually Ben went and sat down on the chair across
from the couch.

Oh, oh. Not a good sign. He never sits all the way over there unless
he's in a mood.

"Everything okay?" I asked.

"Certainly, Ray. Why shouldn't it be?"

I offered up a little half smile, but I was still concerned. Not like
Ben to answer a question with another question. "You just seem . . . I
don't know . . . long day, huh?"

"Not particularly long, just . . . well . . . difficult, perhaps."

What I really wanted was to press him a little harder - get him to
cough up some details - but I'd seen his thumb rub against his eyebrow
twice already since he sat down, and that meant that saying even as little
as he had was hard for him to do, for some reason. "Yeah, I get that. My
day was kind of a pain, too. Supposed to meet with a guy this afternoon,
but he never showed."

"I assume that would be Frank Siracusa?"

Jesus, what was going on here? Had Ben suddenly taken up mind reading
as a hobby? "Siracusa?"

"Yes. I encountered him by chance this afternoon as I was walking
Diefenbaker, and strangely enough we recognized each other. Evidently he
had to 'see a guy about a thing,' as he put it. However, he asked me to
tell you 'Tomorrow, same time, same place' when I saw you."

"Yeah, okay . . . thanks," I mumbled. Shit. What were the odds of Ben
running across Siracusa? Dumb to even wonder, though - what are the odds
of anything that happens in Ben's universe?

A little silence, then Ben asked, "Is this anything I should worry
about, Ray?"

"Nah, just something to do with the case, you know? Hey, so what do you
want to eat tonight? I could do with some food."

And yeah, trying to change the subject worked about as good as I'd
thought it would. Ben just picked up the newspaper from the table and said
he wasn't particularly hungry, but I went into the kitchen anyway, hoping
to find something that looked even vaguely appetizing.

Nothing looked that thrilling to me. Even Dief, who'd followed at my
heels, seemed to have followed me out of habit and not 'cause of hunger -
real or imaginary. Not a begging whine or whimper out of him . . .
just sat there looking at me and doing his stoic wolf thing.

I went back into the living room and sat down on the couch. Picked up a
magazine and skimmed through the pages, but even on my best day, "Mushing
Quarterly" wasn't on my top ten list of must-read magazines, and this was
anything but one of my best days. Or weeks. Or months.

Finally pulled out the file and my notebook and started going through
some of the case notes I'd taken on the Hamilton robbery. A little
mumbling to myself, a little paper shuffling, and wouldn't you know it,
Ben started thawing a little . . . wanted to get involved in the case,
just like I'd guessed he would. It's not like Ben can't be sweet talked
sometimes, but you're always more likely to get him over a funk by
dangling a sticky case in front of him than by doing almost anything else.

We woke up early the next morning and set off together for the jewelry
store so that I could have a talk with Hamilton. Okay, I admit I had an
ulterior motive - I figured that coffee place Bonnie'd told me about would
be open - but I also wanted Ben to take a look at the store. I'd already
popped over there for a few minutes the other day, just to get a quick
look before the place re-opened for business, and yeah, the store had been
dusted for prints two days ago, but sometimes having Ben along at a crime
scene is better then having a whole crime lab in your pocket.

When I'd gone over there on Wednesday, Hamilton hadn't been around,
although I did get a chance to talk to him on the phone the next day, but
he told me he'd be there all day Friday if we needed him for anything We
got there before the security gates'd been opened, but Hamilton waved us
around to the back entrance and brought the two of us into the manager's
office.

Hamilton seemed like a pretty nice guy, if a little yappy. While Ben
went off to nose around - probably literally - out by the display cases, I
talked to the guy, but it was hard as hell to keep him focused on
business. As he walked me through the store, Hamilton gave me a capsule
history of the Hope Diamond, a plot summary of an old Cary Grant movie, a
quick lesson on the way some small diamonds are cut using a spread cut to
make them look bigger to unsuspecting customers . . . just about
everything except any information about the burglary that I hadn't already
found in the report.

I'd gotten a lot of experience over the past years at listening hard
when someone launched into lecture mode, and I didn't want to cut this guy
off, but good intentions or not, after fifteen minutes of this non-stop
ramble, I was starting to get a little agitated. Ben must've seen me
getting ready to go off on the guy and headed off whatever I was about to
say by pointing to a framed photograph hanging up behind the counter.
"Your family, Mr. Hamilton?"

Oh yeah, that turned off the ramble switch. Hamilton took the photo
down, and passed it over to Ben. "My kids. I hope I'm not going to come
across like one of those insufferable parents who thinks his children can
do no wrong, but these kids of mine . . . they're really special, you
know?"

Ben smiled, then handed the picture over to me. Nice looking kids . . .
and the littlest girl - big infectious grin, shining eyes - yeah, she
really was something special; Hamilton had it right, there. Except
. . . there was something a little odd there; her skin looked almost
translucent, like you could see the veins below the surface if you looked
closely enough.

I gave the picture back to Hamilton. "Good looking family. The little
one . . . the one with the bright red hair . . . ."

"Sara. That's my baby. Seven years old . . . next month," he said
softly, while I tried my best not to look shocked; she didn't look like
she could be any older than three or four. "She has such a good attitude
about . . . " and here Hamilton stopped dead in his tracks while Ben and I
exchanged glances.

"So it would appear, Mr. Hamilton," said Ben. "She looks like a happy
little girl. It must be difficult for the family."

"Y-you have no idea," he answered, clutching the picture in his hands
and shaking his head. "No idea."

But Ben and me . . . we did.

When I was in eighth grade, I came pretty close to failing algebra. It
wasn't because I was dumb in math. I always got math. No, the reason they
wanted to hold me back a year was because I could never figure out how to
'show my work.' The teacher'd give me a problem and the next thing I knew,
I was just writing down the answer. Yeah, I'm sure there were steps in
there somewhere, and maybe I was even following those steps . . . but I
couldn't've told you what those steps were if someone had handed me
a million dollars.

Same thing going on in the store that day. All sorts of good cop things
I could've done . . . things I could've asked . . . if I'd needed to, but
I never had to. Jumped right over everything that came before "sick kid,
high medical costs, do anything for her" . . . and it looked like Ben,
who'd probably been born knowing how to 'show his work,' had taken that
jump with me.

And you know, just about the same minute that Ben and me had figured
out it was Hamilton who'd staged the burglary for the insurance money,
Hamilton figured out that we'd figured it out. Didn't try to come
up with a story. Didn't try to make a run for it. Just turned chalk white,
whispered something about 'my baby,' and then just lay his head down on
the counter and started crying.

I'd seen a lot of people fall apart when they realized the game was up,
and usually I didn't give a damn, but I felt bad for Hamilton. Don't know
why - just did, okay? Sorry enough so that I got out my cell and called
Cathy Pearlman over at the State's Attorneys office to give her a head's
up on the case. Found myself going on about leniency, first time offences,
families . . . until she was ready to pop me one if only it'd get me to
shut up. I kept talking about the little kid, Sara, too. "Real cute kid,
Cathy. She's a real cute kid," like cuteness is supposed to have anything
to do with arrests or convictions.

Cathy knew she was being played, but I could tell she didn't mind. If
anything, I think she was kind of surprised that I was so worried about
this guy and his family. Worrying about extenuating circumstances and
options was more her thing than mine. Sometimes I wondered how she ended
up being a prosecuting attorney instead of some earnest Legal Aid lawyer
type.

Anyway, after we'd got back to the station and Hamilton'd been sent off
for processing, me and Ben headed back to my office, both of us in a
pretty good mood. It's not like we'd really had to do much of anything
before the guy caved, but we'd been good together all day, probably better
than we'd been in a while. Plus, we got the bad guy, and when he turned
out to maybe not be such a complete bad guy, we made sure that was
entered into the record as well. By the time we got back to the squad
room, we were both smiling for the first time in twenty-four hours.

However, whatever good mood we'd built up during the day was screwed
for me as soon as we walked in the door and saw Vecchio already in there,
sitting on my desk.

Right away when he saw us walking in, Vecchio gave "Benny" a big grin
and threw his arms open in this "come to papa" kind of way. Ignored me, of
course, but that's to be expected. Vecchio couldn't be too smart if he
didn't notice that it bothered Ben when he did that, but being ignored by
him sure as hell didn't bother me. Hugging Vecchio hadn't ever been
on my 'things to do' list, and the less time I had to spend around him,
the better . . . more true now than ever.

Ben returned the happy greeting with Vecchio while I went off to finish
handing off the paperwork for the Hamilton case. When I got back to my
desk, there was a note from Ben that Vecchio'd asked him to join him for a
talk and that he'd see me in a little bit.

Not exactly thrilled about that, but I wasn't about to tell Ben who he
could and couldn't be friends with, even if the guy got on my last nerve.
Ten minutes later, I was even less thrilled when I got called into Welsh's
office, only to find that there was a phone call waiting for me in there.
Turned out to be Genovese, sounding like he'd just been kicked in the
head.

"The investigation's off, Kowalski. Pack up your notes, turn them in,
and forget you heard anything about this."

"What the fuck are you talking about, Genovese? You bust my chops to
get me to agree to this thing and then just when the case is maybe going
somewhere, you call me and say, oh, terribly sorry . . . all a big
mistake? What the hell's going on?"

For a second, all I heard was a sigh on the other end of the line and
then, "Yeah, listen . . . I know I owe you more of an explanation. Meet me
outside, somewhere . . . Grant Park, over by the band shell, in about
fifteen minutes or so. That okay with you?"

What could I do? Of course I agreed. The wind was kicking up a little
by the time I got to the park, but it was still bright out. I spotted
Genovese sitting on one of the benches, jacket open, leaning back with his
eyes closed to catch the last rays of the sun, and looking as wiped out as
I felt.

"Okay," I said, kicking at his shoe to get his attention, "You gonna
tell me what's going on? It's not like I'm finding out that Vecchio should
be named Public Enemy Number One or anything, but he's definitely crossed
the line more than once. But I think maybe he's just the tip of an iceberg
. . . some of the leads I've been following are jumping right over him and
up . . . well . . . somewhere."

"Yeah, and that 'somewhere' is exactly why we've been told to close
this down. Trust me, Kowalski, if it were up to me, we'd go forward with
this, but I've got bosses too, and they're making it clear as hell that
pursuing this would be dangerous to my career and maybe even . . . well .
. . let's just stick with career, okay?"

"You're kidding me!"

"Do I look like I'm kidding? I'm not. Evidently too many questions were
being raised in certain places and . . . god, I sound like I just crawled
out of a bad spy novel. Anyway, it looks like some important people were
getting annoyed, so that's it - no investigation."

"Shit."

"Yeah, something like that."

Genovese was disgusted with the whole mess, and so was I. It wasn't
like I'd wanted to get into this thing to begin with, but once I was
involved, I wanted to see it through. Didn't look like there was anything
I could do about it though. Genovese thanked me for my help, I grunted
some kind of begrudging acknowledgment, and the two of us went our
separate ways.

So that was that. Weeks of rooting around in Vecchio's semi-dirty
laundry, sneaking around behind my colleagues' backs, and driving my
partner crazy with my secrecy, and it was all for nothing because any more
looking into Vecchio's history might end up with some big-shots getting
embarrassed or worse.

I drove back to the station, blasting an old Clash tape that had
somehow been overlooked during my dad's eagle-eyed car cleaning, and tried
not to think about how much the whole situation sucked.

I parked the car, walked up to the front of the station, and saw Stella
standing next to Vecchio's Riv like she was on guard duty or something.
Said hello - it wasn't like we were strangers - but all I got back from
her was a dirty look.

"What?"

"I'm not going to discuss this with you, Ray," Stella replied, turning
away from me.

"Discuss what? What did I do this time?" I asked.

She turned back toward me and said, "Are you so jealous of Ray that you
decided to launch your own personal vendetta against him? Is this the kind
of thing you've been learning from your Mountie . . . boyfriend?"

Oh shit, I thought, this day was just getting better and better. She
knew. She had to know. Decided to tough it out, though. Maybe if I was
really lucky I'd find out she was pissed at me for some entirely different
reason.

"What're you talking about, Stella?"

"Come on, Ray, don't start lying to me all of a sudden. That really is
beneath you. You know what I'm talking about, or do the words 'Internal
Affairs' no longer mean anything to you?"

Okay, she did know, but I was still getting a little annoyed, and even
though I didn't feel like justifying myself, old habits die hard when it
comes to Stella. Before I knew it, I found myself going on about duty and
the job and all that.

"This is not about duty and you know it. You're doing it because
you resent Ray . . . or because you still resent my involvement with Ray."

Drove me nuts. After all I did to make sure I was approaching this
investigation with an unbiased eye, there I was - standing in front of
my station house and getting reamed out by my ex-wife like I'd been
a bad little boy.

I had just about zero interest in getting any deeper into the whole
thing with Stella - I knew that would be pretty much a losing proposition
- so I just said 'see ya' and started on into the station. Not fast enough
to avoid Vecchio, though, who'd just come out to join my . . . his wife. I
ignored him except for a perfunctory sort of nod, but he just smirked at
me as Stella got into the car, "Hello, Stanley. Benny and I had a nice
little talk."

"Yeah, that's great, Vecchio. Nice to hear you had such a good day."

"Sorry yours hasn't been as good, Kowalski," he said, sidling up next
to me and lowering his voice. "It's a real pain when a case just collapses
around you, isn't it?"

"What're you talking about? The Hamilton case is just about . . . "

"Not the Hamilton case, moron. No, I'm talking about something nearer
and dearer to both our hearts." He smirked again and turned away, "Ciao,
paisano."

Shit. Okay, not only did he know about the IA investigation - he
obviously knew about the end of the investigation. And Vecchio was
never very good at keeping his trap shut when he knew something, which
meant . . . oh, shit.

I walked inside, and there was Ben, sitting next to my desk, slouched
down in the chair in a very un-Mountielike way. I tried to keep things
light and get him to talk, but he was clearly in no mood for any more
conversation, and after a little while he got up and said that he was
leaving.

I looked up in surprise. "You're not due back at the Consulate today,
are you?"

"No," he answered, "I'm just feeling a bit hemmed in. I think I'll go
for a walk. Come, Dief." And with that he turned and started to leave.

"Hey, Ben," I called after him, "I'm not going to be long; you want
some company?"

He turned back to me and closed the small gap between us. "I think I'd
prefer to be alone, if you don't mind, Ray. There are some things I need
to give my attention to, and I think I can do that more easily without any
distractions. Even pleasant distractions," he added with a slight smile.

So why was he taking Dief, I thought, but just said, "This has
something to do with Vecchio, doesn't it? I'm sorry I couldn't talk about
it, Ben. It's just that . . . ."

"Ray, I understand why you weren't free to discuss the details of your
investigation with me."

I opened my mouth and started to say . . . to say . . . I'm not sure
what I was going to say 'cause before I could say anything, Ben had placed
his hand lightly over my mouth. Mmm . . . tasted good. "It might be
advisable to postpone this conversation until we're out of the station."
Conversation? What conversation? Who wanted to talk? All I could think of
wanting at that moment was to keep Ben's hand right where it was, to suck
his fingers further into my mouth, and . . . .

"Ray. Ray. Ray! Perhaps this, too, might be better left for a time when
we're in . . . a less public venue?" he said, blushing a little.

Christ, what was I doing? I shook myself and sat back in my chair, as
far away from the temptation of Ben's fingertips as possible.

He nodded, then turned around to leave, but he stopped and turned back
to face me. For a minute Ben looked like he wanted to say something, but
instead he just reached out his hand and touched my cheek with those
still-damp fingertips for a moment.

Then he did go.

I watched him leave and a weird cold feeling settled over me.

I invented some busy work at the station to keep me occupied for a
couple of hours, but eventually I couldn't overcome my allergy to
paperwork. I signed out for the day and headed home, but when I got there,
the place was sounding way too quiet and looking way too empty. A lot of
that going on these days. Started to freak out a little, wondering if
maybe Ben was so pissed off with me that he'd decided to stay away that
night, or worse, to stay away permanently, but after a few minutes passed,
Dief came out of the bedroom and nuzzled against me for a few minutes, and
if Dief was there, Ben wasn't far away.

I leaned down to scratch behind Dief's ears for a few seconds and then
went into the bedroom where I found Ben sitting on the side of the bed,
just kind of looking down at the rug on the floor. Didn't move when I came
in, didn't turn around . . . in fact, he barely acknowledged my presence,
which wasn't his thing at all.

"Hey, Ben," I said, nudging him a little, "You okay?"

I was hoping I sounded normal, but that was probably too much to hope
for. I'd known he'd find out about the Vecchio thing sooner or later . . .
and I'd known he'd be upset about my involvement. I just hadn't figured
he'd be so pissed off with me that he wouldn't even talk to me.

I guess Ben was doing that mind reading thing again, because he turned
toward me immediately and smiled. Gave me a bunch of
meant-to-be-reassuring words about everything being fine - but it sounded
pretty much like he was lying, and he almost never lies. I tried a
few more times to get him to talk - I really wanted to hear what Vecchio'd
been saying to him - but I finally had to resign myself to the fact that
Ben just wasn't in any kind of a chatty mood.

Made myself a sandwich and sat down on the couch, remote in hand,
trying to find something on TV that was loud enough and annoying enough to
break through the quiet, but after an hour'd passed, I still couldn't
settle on anything.

I looked over at Ben down at the other end of the couch. He had a book
in his lap - Tom Wolfe . . . he was reading Tom Wolfe? . . . no, Thomas
Wolfe, okay, that made more sense. But he wasn't really reading his book
any more than I was really watching TV. In fact, all he seemed to be doing
at that moment was squeezing the bridge of his nose like he had some kind
of killer headache.

Thought for maybe half a second about giving the talking thing one more
try, but I knew it wouldn't do any good. Instead, I just switched off the
TV and pushed myself up off the couch.

Ben looked up. "Ray? Are you all right?"

God, was that all either one of us could say these days? "Yeah, just a
little tired, Ben. Think I'll go to bed. You coming?"

"I thought I might just read one more . . . ."

Come on, Ben," I said, as I took the book out of his hands and put it
on the table. "You know you're not really paying any attention to what
you're reading." I reached over and rubbed my thumb back and forth across
his forehead a few times. "Your head hurting?"

"It seems to be . . . perhaps it's just tension."

"Hey, you'd better do something about that," I said, still rubbing his
forehead. "They say tension's the silent killer."

A small smile lit his face as he looked up at me. "I thought it was
routine that was the silent killer, Ray."

"Oh yeah, well . . . they changed it again. You gotta keep up on this
stuff, buddy."

I pulled Ben up off the couch and steered him into the bedroom, but in
the end, I probably could have left him out there with his book for
company. I guess somewhere inside I'd been hoping that the closeness of
the night would be enough to help us find a way to reconnect, but it
didn't really happen. Yeah, we slept in the same bed that night, but as
far as I was concerned, we might as well have been miles apart.
Uncomfortable, you know? Out of synch. It felt like I was finally sleeping
without him for the first time since that night in the Territories.

No surprise, but I didn't really get much sleep that night, and I have
a feeling Ben didn't either, if all that shifting around in bed he was
doing was anything to go by. Definitely glad the next morning was Saturday
. . . I was just too damned tired to be worth much if I'd had to go into
work. What I was really hoping was that I could just sort of wallow for a
while and put off starting the day - maybe even fall asleep for real for a
couple hours - but of course that didn't happen. Like I'd been doing for
years, I woke up early because Ben was up early, getting ready to take
Dief out for a walk. My eyes might not've been open yet, but I was awake.

After he left - and way earlier than I wanted to - I got out of bed and
went to put some coffee on, then changed my mind and decided to make a pot
of tea instead. It was just about ready by the time Fraser came back to
the apartment. I had a feeling Fraser knew that the drink was like a peace
offering or something, because he actually smiled when he took the mug
from my hand, and I was real happy to see that smile, even though the eyes
behind it still looked kind of tired and distant.

The two of us brought our tea into the living room and sat down on the
sofa. Both of us were silent, but it wasn't a bad silence, not really.
Maybe just a busy silence, if that makes any sense . . . or at least it
was a busy silence over at Fraser's end of the couch. Me, I don't know if
I was thinking anything.

"I'm the last person who could fail to understand the notion of doing
one's duty, no matter the personal cost."

Yeah, I knew that about him, but something was still off about his
reaction. "I don't think Vecchio's gonna get in any trouble or anything,
if that's what you've been worrying about," I said, trying to reassure him
a little, but Ben got that determined-not-to-seem-mad look on his face,
the one that always guaranteed he really was mad.

"It hasn't been, as it happens," he said in the kind of prissy tones I
hadn't heard in a long time. "In fact, if I'm angry at anyone, it's Ray
Vecchio. Or perhaps in the final analysis, it's really myself that I'm
angry with."

Huh? How did any of this get to be Ben's responsibility? I mean, I knew
he was a gold medallist in undeserved guilt, but this was pretty far out,
even for him, and I said so. "I don't get that. Why are you angry with
yourself?"

Thumb across the eyebrow . . . uh huh, I could've called that one. "For
demonstrating once again that my assessments of the people for whom I have
the deepest feelings are invariably wrong."

Vecchio, yeah. Okay, I got that. 'People,' though . . . so he was
probably talking about the Metcalf, chick too.

Needless to say, I couldn't get Ben to spill the beans about what
Vecchio'd said to him the day before, but even with Ben just dancing
around the details, it sounded like they'd had a hell of a talk. I found
myself defending Vecchio, of all things . . . telling Ben I hadn't really
found out anything that bad, that he probably had good intentions,
and a bunch of other shit that I didn't really believe, but Ben waved off
everything I was saying pretty damned fast.

"Ray, it's just . . . how could I not have known what he was really
like? How could I have held such a firm conviction that, fundamentally, he
was a truly honorable man?"

"Because he's your friend, Ben, and . . . ."

"Was my friend."

"Oh, come on - that's so not like you, Ben. You don't stop caring about
people just like that." What the hell was I doing? Why was I trying to
convince Ben to stay friends with that jerk?

"I'm not certain about that, Ray. At the moment I'm not certain about
anything." Ben sighed and lay back on the couch. "I think I'm beginning to
realize now that when I . . . when I care about someone it blinds me to
what they're really like . . . blinds me to the nature of our
relationship. I don't know how I can continue to trust my feelings when it
appears that I only see what I want to see . . . and not things as they
really are."

He was sounding a little chokey, too; real unhappy emotions were being
stirred around in the pot. And okay, that was all right . . . I mean, he'd
finally learned how to show happiness every once in a while; no reason why
he couldn't show a little unhappiness, too. And everything he was saying
made some kind of sense to me, but it didn't take long to realize that if
this was what he'd got whirring around in his brain, then maybe there was
room there for more than just Vecchio and Victoria. Couldn't trust his
feelings?

"Does this include how you're feeling about us, Ben?" I asked.

The tiniest of pauses, but it was enough. He recovered and said, "No .
. . God no, Ray. Don't even think that, not for a moment."

Maybe if Ben had stopped right there, I'd have bought it lock, stock,
and two smoking barrels, but he kept going on and on until nothing he was
saying sounded right anymore. Sort of like that Hamlet thing: methinks
the Mountie doth protest too much.

Whatever the truth was, I just knew that was about all I was going to
get out of him that weekend in terms of a heart-to-heart conversation -
stubborn Mountie, or have I mentioned that before? - so I figured I'd just
quit pressing. The afternoon came around, and I thought maybe Ben and me
could go out, maybe do something together, but as soon as I brought up the
idea, some mysterious never-before-mentioned consular duty popped out of
nowhere, and Ben took off with Dief for the afternoon. Then Sunday came
and it was pretty much the same thing, with Ben disappearing for most of
the day - again with Dief . . . and without me.

I was almost looking forward to going back to work on Monday.

Soon as I got back to the station the next day, Welsh called me into
his office. I was kind of worried about what his reaction was going to be
to this whole thing, but in the end it was okay. I mean, I knew that Welsh
had known Vecchio for a long time and everything, but he didn't even
mention Vecchio's name that morning . . . just sort of patted me on the
shoulder a couple of times, asked me how the wrap up of the Hamilton case
was going, and then paused and told me he was proud of me. Nice to hear.
Welsh looked a little embarrassed when he said it, and as soon as he
finished, our little bonding moment ended. He booted me out of his office
and told me to get back to work.

The rest of the day was pretty much like that. Not great, but not too
bad either. I heard a few stray rodent-type squeaks from one or two people
in other squads as I passed them in the hall and some joker left a piece
of cheese sitting on my desk sometime during the day - hell, not much
chance the whole station hadn't heard all the details of my time with the
rat squad by this point - but mostly people were being pretty cool about
the investigation.

Frannie was just about the only person in the squad who was bringing me
down a little, but I wasn't about to blame her. Whatever else he was, Ray
Vecchio was her family. The thing is, though, Frannie wasn't exactly going
off on me like I might've expected her to do. She was just really distant
and quiet, kind of like Fraser had been acting, really.

I kept trying to let her know I was sorry for what I'd had to do, but
she got real good, real fast at tuning me out. Then I tried another tack
and every so often, I'd look over her way and smile a little, but she'd
just give me a sort of blank look in response - not mean, just blank - and
eventually, she'd turn away.

Pretty uncomfortable, you know, considering we still had to work
together. Got to where if I needed something from her I'd end up leaving
post-it notes on her desk, and whatever I'd needed would magically appear
some time later in the day. Not the best system, but I figured I'd put up
with it for a while . . . see what happened.

Quitting time came around, a few days after the Vecchio investigation
was closed. I was writing a follow-up report on the Hamilton case - it was
starting to look like the guy might not have to do much prison time, which
I was happy about - when a printout I'd been looking for earlier
materialized on top of my desk. I looked up to see Frannie there, with her
jacket on, ready to go home for the day.

I gave her a sort of half smile, half questioning look, and instead of
just ignoring me like she'd been doing, she kinda thumped me on the
shoulder just like she used to do. Okay, except this time it was a little
harder. A lot harder.

"Hey, Frannie."

"Ray." She bit her bottom lip, and then thumped me again. "You know I'm
still pissed with you, right?"

"Yeah. Frannie, I'm sorry that . . . ."

"Oh shut up, Ray. You're not really sorry." She let out a sigh, then
thumped me once more for good measure. "I don't even know if you should
be, but . . . he's my brother, you know?"

Yeah, I knew.

"So, anyway . . . okay . . . that's all I wanted to say."

I nodded, and she started to leave, but then she stopped. Didn't turn
around, just sighed again and said, "Night, Ray."

"Night, Frannie."

Wasn't the best conversation on record, but it wasn't bad. Didn't want
to lose Frannie's friendship and it was looking like maybe I wouldn't. I'd
just have to give it some time. I could do that. I still didn't like being
patient, but I'd figured out how to do it over the past few years.

Wish I could say that I felt as confident about the way things were
going with Fraser. Half the time, it was like I was living with
alternate-universe Mountie, and I don't mean that in a good way. Almost
like somewhere along the line Fraser and me switched personalities, and he
only got my bad stuff. I know I can be a pain in the ass some of the time.
Maybe even a lot of the time. But I'd learned something about this
relationship crap in the post-Stella era, and I thought I was getting it
mostly right.

Couldn't tell though, by the way he was acting. He sniped at me for the
lamest reasons. Not really nasty, just . . . I don't know. Kind of bitchy,
like he had a headache 24/7.

And the rest of the time he was so distracted I sometimes wondered if
someone had hypnotized him while I wasn't looking. You know that zoning
out thing he used to do sometimes when he was working through a puzzle? He
was doing that a lot now. Just sort of off into his own head with a
vengeance.

Weird thing was that when I wasn't getting pissed off about the way he
was treating me, I was almost looking at this screwed-up behavior as a
good thing.

Almost.

I mean, it's not like Fraser's any kind of angel. He's got a hell of a
temper on him, even though he doesn't give it free rein very much. He can
be arrogant. He can be selfish. Sure, he's got that goody-goody thing
working for him, and it's not like it's an act - hell, he is a pretty good
guy most of the time. But anyone who couldn't see that he was just as
capable of acting like a dick as anyone else sometimes just didn't know
Fraser very well.

But usually his dickiness . . . well, it's like a tool or something. He
uses it for other people's sakes, mostly, not just because he wakes up in
the morning and feels like being a dick.

This time, though, there didn't seem to be some 'higher good' or
whatever driving him, so it had to just be for his own sake, and maybe
that wasn't such a bad thing, the way I figured it. If I could chill until
Frannie was ready to give me the time of day, I could do the same for
Fraser while he did a little staring into his navel. Sure, the way he was
acting was driving me a little crazy, but in a freaky way I kind of liked
the fact that even with what had happened, he still felt easy enough with
me to just ignore me like he was doing and pay a little attention to
himself for once.

Trouble was, though, none of that introspection seemed to get him
anywhere. More than once, I offered to talk to him about whatever was
bugging him, and I'll give him credit for trying, but it just wasn't
happening. The few times we actually sat down to hash this shit out, it
was like I could just tell when the switch in his brain got flipped to
off. Just: "okay: no more talking about this" . . . and that was that. I
was getting pretty frustrated - I mean, shit . . . who'd been the one
doing the undercover thing? Him or me? But it was pretty obvious I wasn't
half as frustrated as Fraser seemed to be getting, until one morning he'd
just had enough.

We hadn't even gotten out of bed. Hell, I hadn't even opened my eyes.
Then all of a sudden, I heard Ben say, "I can't do this anymore, Ray. I've
got to leave."

Whoa. Okay, the eyes were open.

"Leave where? Go where? Shit, Ben, you think you could have waited with
this until I got a cup of coffee in my hand? Or better yet, waited a few
dozen years until I was checked into the old folks' home?" I crawled out
from under the covers and leaned my head back against the wall behind the
bed. "Come on," I said, nudging him with my left foot, "Get up. It's
talking time."

Ben sat up cross-legged in bed, his hands folded in his lap. He didn't
start talking, of course. Can't get the guy to shut up when he's in a
storytelling mood; can't get him to open his yap when he's . . . not.

I kind of bumped against his right shoulder a couple of times to try
and get a reaction of him, and yeah . . . I did get half a smile in
response. But he still hadn't started talking, and he still wouldn't look
at me. Just kept staring down at his fingernails like they were the most
interesting things he'd seen all week.

"Come on, Ben . . . talk to me. What's going on?" I nudged him once
more for good measure, then figured 'what the hell' and pulled him toward
me until his back was pressed up against my chest.

For a minute there I thought Ben was going to do one of those block of
wood impressions that I'd gotten to know in the earliest days of our
working relationship. But you know something? By this point, Ben and me
had been together for a long time, and it was sort of like his body didn't
really remember how to be anything but easy with me, even if his mind
wasn't exactly agreeing.

I let Ben rest quietly against me for a few minutes.

"You know I don't want to be apart from you, don't you, Ray?" he said
finally. He took my hands in his own and wrapped my arms tightly around
his chest, locking himself in my embrace. "Can you . . . do you know
that?"

I leaned forward and nuzzled against his right temple, "Yeah, I know
that, Ben." I said softly, "I know that you don't."

"It's just that . . . " he paused, took a deep breath, and tightened
his hold on my forearms, "It's just that I seem to be more distressed
about this situation with . . . Ray than I would have imagined I could be.
I need . . . I need some perspective to make sense of whatever it is I'm
feeling at the moment, Ray, but I'm finding it uncharacteristically
difficult to order my thoughts while I'm here."

Wasn't like I had an argument for that.

"So . . . um . . . ." Okay, I had to keep it together. Communicate.
Shit. "What are you . . . where do you think you'll go?" I asked.

"Inspector Sellers was kind enough to give me some time off . . . "

"Okay, that's good," I said, although I knew 'kind' had nothing to do
with it; I figured by now the RCMP owed Ben more time off than he'd ever
use.

"In any case, I rang Quinn last Sunday . . . asked if I might impose
upon his hospitality for a time. Perhaps you'll remember that I told you
he's now living in . . . ."

Can your ears go blind all of a sudden? It was like I'd just been
jumped in an alley by a gang of white noise 'cause all of a sudden I
couldn't hear anything Ben was saying. He called Quinn almost a week ago?
Making plans about his future . . . our future . . . alone? And he
was just getting around to telling me about it now? Whatthefuck!

I wanted out of the bed. Wanted to move, pace the floor, hit the wall .
. . something. But before I'd decided which I wanted more, Ben's arms
closed more tightly over my own, fingers clutching mine.

"Ray?

And in that one syllable I was hearing confusion, sadness, worry, and I
didn't know how he was able to cram all that into one syllable, but I did
know I had to listen. Not move, just listen.

"I'm sorry, Ray. I know this must sound terribly sudden . . . ." My
snort interrupted him, and he began to turn his head toward me.

"No, go on . . . keep talking," I said.

"Are you sure you're all right?"

"Yeah, I'm sure. Go on."

"As you know, since he had to relocate, Quinn's been working as a guide
with Yellowknife Outfitters, which has become something of a . . . well, I
don't suppose that's really important. What is important is that he is
willing to take me in, and . . . ."

"He has to take you in."

" . . . he . . . huh?"

If this all hadn't been so serious, I would've laughed out loud. I love
it when he says 'huh.' Not sure why really, I just do. Maybe it's just
because it sounds so wrong when he says it.

"Has to take you in. Some poem . . . what's that line, Ben? About home?

"Ah . . . Robert Frost?"

"Maybe. Say it for me."

"Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take
you in?"

"Yeah, that's it. Okay," I said, still trying to think why this quote
had come to mind. "So you have to go there, right? North? To Quinn? You
have to go home?"

I'd had no clue how worried he'd been about my reaction until I said
that and immediately felt the change in Ben's body - felt him really
relax, finally.

"You do understand," he said, and leaned his cheek softly
against my arm.

And you know, I really didn't.

But we talked more, Ben and me, and maybe I did end up getting some of
it.

I'm not going to say I was liking any part of this separation idea.
Felt like that separate vacation thing . . . kind of a flashback to the
dying days of my marriage, and I just didn't want to revisit that place.
But with Stella . . . well, in the end it was mostly about her not wanting
to be with me, and I knew . . . I knew that wasn't really what was
going on in Ben's head. No, with Ben it was about him needing to find out
what was rattling around in his brain and sort things out.

Different stuff altogether.

Okay, I admit it, I was kind of jealous that Ben was turning north -
turning to Quinn - when he could barely even begin to talk to me about
what was up with him. But this was something he needed - he needed to go
home - and when you love someone, well . . . you gotta help them get what
they need.

And I loved him.

So I watched Ben pack, drove him out to O'Hare, kissed him goodbye,
saved the sniffling until after his plane took off, and went in to the
station with Dief.